Chaos struck yesterday’s pre-deposit window for DeFi customers eager to be early to the December launch of MegaETH’s Frontier mainnet.
A number of obstacles included a buggy and overloaded know-your-customer (KYC) verification course of, the preliminary cap of $250 million being stuffed in lower than three minutes, and subsequent changes to the cap being mishandled.
A press release from MegaETH’s X profile acknowledged that the day’s occasions had been “not acceptable.” It says the launch “encountered a variety of minor technical issues that, when compounded, provided a subpar user experience.”
What went flawed?
MegaETH payments itself as “the first real-time blockchain,” promising >100,000 transactions per second (TPS) and sub-10 ms block occasions.
Ironic, then, that one of many first of a collection of blunders got here from congestion. The occasion was briefly delayed as a result of a “mismatch in SaleUUID” between the deposit contract and KYC-checker Sonar.
Then, a visitors jam hit as a result of “a misconfigured rate limit on the Sonar side… [which] was set too low.”
Sadly our third celebration supplier acquired too many requests leading to downtime.
The $250M cap stuffed inside 156 seconds upon decision.
We have determined to extend the cap to $1B in an effort to present customers entry to USDm day 1.
Bridge will reopen at 11am EST.
— MegaETH (@megaeth) November 25, 2025
As soon as this was fastened, nonetheless, deposits hit the $250 million cap in underneath three minutes. MegaETH suspects the reopening was caught by customers “spamming refresh,” moderately than these monitoring “official channels” of communication.
Consequently, the crew determined to quadruple the preliminary cap to permit those that missed out a second probability, setting the reopening for 2 hours after the preliminary launch.
This didn’t go easily, both.
‘Oops’
The transaction to lift the deposit cap to $1 billion was queued in Secure, the multisig pockets, requiring 4 signatures.
All 4 signatures had been acquired properly upfront of the time the crew had set for the cap improve.
With the eyes of would-be depositors on the crew’s actions, one consumer jumped on the probability.
As soon as a multisig transaction has the required signatures, anybody can execute it. Person chud.eth determined to take issues into their very own fingers.
The cap was raised over half an hour early, with deposits quickly pouring in as soon as once more.
“Unfortunately, the party responsible for executing the raise tx was unfamiliar with the specific Safe feature,” MegaETH defined.
The crew determined to override the brand new $1 billion cap, citing related considerations over the deviation from official comms.
A primary try and cap deposits at $400 million failed, as deposits had already surpassed that quantity. Lastly, the crew was capable of set the cap at $500 million, 13 minutes after chud.eth’s intervention (and nonetheless previous to the formally introduced time).
Finally MegaETH “decided not to move forward with the additional cap due to a few unresolved bugs around KYC verification stopping users from participating.”
As soon as the mud had settled, blockchain analyst Dethective broke down the deposits, the most important of which was reportedly $40 million.
Some knowledge in regards to the MegaETH predeposit:
• The highest depositor despatched $40M (the largest was $25.5M through the first window)• Common deposit: $102,396• Median deposit: $3,100• Prime 10 depositors contributed 29% of whole quantity• 4,589 distinctive addresses pic.twitter.com/48GaCkhPD7
— dethective (@dethective) November 25, 2025
Permissionless finance
This isn’t the primary time a hotly anticipated DeFi mission has been tinkered with by a group member.
On the top of 2020’s DeFi summer time, nameless consumer 0xc4ad determined to launch veteran decentralized change Curve Finance’s DAO contracts and governance token (CRV).
Though such examples of DeFi’s “permissionless” nature don’t essentially trigger hurt, multisig signers being “unfamiliar” with how transactions are executed has led to doubts in regards to the crew’s skill to “reshape the future of finance.”
